Opportunity Management

Onboarding is a challenge for most technical companies. In my 30-plus years as a hiring manager in the industrial automation business it took, on average, three months to learn the product and application basics. Even with three to five years’ experience, it took six months to become proficient enough to make effective sales calls. Despite this lag in performance, many companies have no effective policy or procedure that ensures efficient and effective onboarding.

Actionable, process-oriented dashboards provide visibility to critical information needed to manage all stages of the sales process from lead to after sale follow up. Dashboards let you see every step of the sales process even how you are performing on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis.

How can focused account profiling promote business growth?

Last week during a CRM roundtable webinar I hosted with MCAA, we discussed ways to use CRM data to make better business decisions. One of the hot topics was Account Profiling and how using a 4-dimensional approach can help grow your business volume with focus on where your sales team should spend their time. You may say, “We have a profiling system and we grade our accounts.” In my experience, the information is usually only 1-dimensional; basing it off current or the past years business volume and not growing volume. This is where the 4-dimensional approach becomes invaluable.

I’ve found through my talks at different meetings typically 70-80% of those in attendance are using some type of CRM within their company. And that only 10% feel they are getting ROI out of their CRM. One of the factors that lead to success is setting the stage for WHY from the beginning…including getting management buy in.

Last week, I hosted an online CRM best practices roundtable in partnership with the Measurement, Control and Automation Association (MCAA). We covered a variety of topics, but tracking opportunities on the front end of the sales cycle was a dominant theme. Below, I’ve compiled a few opportunity management tips from the session for those who weren’t able to attend this members-only roundtable.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get excited about sales concepts, and how hard it is to turn them into a reality? We’ve all been there. We send our sales teams to a one- or two-day class and they come home with a head full of ideas and a three-ring binder.

One-dimensional account profiling, typically using A, B, C or D based on the current business from each customer, is a step in the right direction. But if you want to take a more proactive approach to uncover new opportunities with existing and potential customers, take your profiling a step further.

In the second webcast of the MDM-SalesProcess360 quarterly series, Brian Gardner, author of ROI from CRM: It’s About Sales Process, Not Just Technology, will home in on a critical part of that process: sales opportunity management.

Learn more about this webinar here or register now.

Join Reed Stith, our newest addition to the SalesProcess360 team, for a quick 30-minute webinar on sales opportunity management on Oct. 28 at 11-11:30 ET.

In this webinar, Stith will provide three practical insights to guide your team as it shifts from a reactive to a proactive mindset when it comes to acting on sales opportunities in both existing and new accounts.

Did you miss this webinar? Register and watch it on-demand!

At SalesProcess360, we put a premium on processes around the front end of the sales cycle, which includes lead and opportunity management.

Quotes and orders make up the back-end of the sales cycle, and that is where most distribution companies spend their time.

What’s wrong with managing at the quote stage?